What’ll Supernaw Do About Working?
Texas singer-songwriter Doug Supernaw says he already has received “a couple of inquiries” from record companies after being dropped by BNA Records as his career’s fastest-rising single, “What’ll You Do About Me,” ran into stiffening resistance from radio programmers.
Some of them, Supernaw says, told BNA they chose not to play the song because of the atmosphere against violence against women created by the O.J. Simpson trial. The resistance continued even after Supernaw’s record was retooled with a new line, “I’m on the porch with dinner for two,” instead of the original, “I’m on the porch with a two-by-two.”
“They were afraid people would take it as a stalking song,” explains the maverick performer. He adds that when the record reached No. 16 the other day in the Billboard country hit charts the resistance became insurmountable, effectively killing the single. The next day, he says, BNA had a meeting, and the day after that he was notified that he was being dropped from the BNA artist roster.
Supernaw says he and BNA management disagreed about material on his album, “Deep Thoughts From a Shallow Mind.” “They just said it would take too long for me to see things their way,” Supernaw says. “They said they had to move on, that they didn’t have time to try to convince me to do things their way.”
Supernaw - whose debut album, “Red and Rio Grande,” sold more than 500,000 copies and thereby achieved certification as “gold” - says he had wanted BNA executives to release another single or two from “Deep Thoughts From a Shallow Mind,” his second BNA collection. “What’ll You Do About Me” was the package’s third single, and the first two didn’t reach the charts’ top 40.
The singer says the executives suggested “scrapping” “Deep Thoughts From a Shallow Mind” altogether and recording a new album. “I didn’t want to scrap this album because I’m very proud of it,” he says.
He adds that he can see how in the current climate there might be a negative reaction to “What’ll You Do About Me,” a song written by Dennis Linde and first recorded by Randy Travis in the late 1980s.
It was “just bad timing, I guess,” he says, but adds that he also thinks “it’s a shame when a songwriter sits down with his pen and has to think ‘Is this politically correct or not?’ I think that’s a bad thing.”
Trevino’s new album ‘better’
Another, somewhat younger Texan, fast-rising Rick Trevino, has a second album hitting the market. “Looking for the Light,” Trevino says, is even better than his first collection, which contains the big hits “She Can’t Say I Didn’t Cry” and “Doctor Time.”
Such successes bring a recognition that results in a substantial loss of privacy, but Trevino seems to be a realistic-minded young man who figures that what he gives up is worth what he gets in return.
“I haven’t had a problem with it, although in Texas and some other parts of the country it’s pretty hard to go anywhere” without being recognized, he reports. “But it’s not something I look on as a negative thing, because it could be where nobody cares. I’d rather have it be like it is.”
Billionaire’s band
The man (and presumably the money) behind the new group Dallas County Line, the new “Honk” line dance and a recent danceathon held simultaneously in 60 cities in behalf of United Cerebral Palsy is billionaire businessman Richard Scrushy, Dallas County Line’s lead singer and CEO of Healthsouth Corp.
Scrushy has been playing in bands since before he was 10 years old. He never lost his appreciation for music, even after he built Healthsouth, the nation’s largest provider of rehabilitative health care.
Weirdly, Scrushy has recently become the lead singer of Dallas County Line, an all-notable aggregation that includes Bobby Randall, co-founder and former guitarist of Sawyer Brown; Jack Daniels, ex-Highway 101 guitarist; exOak Ridge Boys bassist Don Breland; and drummer Chris Eddy, son of pioneer rock ‘n’ roll guitarist Duane Eddy.
Multi-sport athlete Bo Jackson, wrestler Lex Luger and auto racer Bobby Allison appear - obviously through Scrushy’s connections - in the video of “Honk If You Love to Honky Tonk,” a song from the group’s forthcoming Curb Records CD.
Portland artist rising
Producer and guitarist Pete Anderson - who works with Dwight Yoakam, Michelle Shocked and the Meat Puppets and who also recently released his own album, “Working Class” - doesn’t have a lot of spare time. So news that Anderson has decided to produce an unknown singer-songwriter named John Bunzow (pronounced Bunn-zoh) shouldn’t be taken lightly.
It turns out that “Stories of the Years,” the album Anderson and Bunzow have made together that is scheduled for release by Liberty Records in May, features a stunning lineup of songs. Bunzow wrote all but one of the songs - and he co-wrote that one.
A native of Portland, Ore., and a graduate of the University of Oregon with a degree in social work, Bunzow lists his musical heroes as Tom T. Hall, Tammy Wynette and Waylon Jennings, but especially Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, with Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Billy Joe Shaver and Jimmy Webb as his favorite songwriters.
Bunzow is a great and unique guitar player. “John’s guitar playing is such an integral part of his musical identity that I just turned him loose,” Pete Anderson says. “I ended up playing on only two cuts.”